Alison’s wrists itched from the new cuffs they’d put on. No collar—that would be for her new owner to choose.
When women had come to clean her up and get her dressed, Alison had tried her best to convince them to help her. They weren’t mean, but it became clear they’d never do a thing for her.
Fear was a powerful motivator, and these women had been beaten down for too long. Besides, Galen had hovered, staring far too intently when she’d changed.
They’d given her a dress that reminded her of what her mother used to wear. Knee length, buttons up the front, black with a tie around the waist to show off how narrow she was there. It was the perfect outfit for a little homemaker, as if it would somehow turn her into what her father thought she needed to be.
Hell, what her father thought she was deep down.
And yet his words stung. They stuck with her as they always had. No matter how many times in her life she’d told herself to ignore what he said, that all those jabs delivered without inflection were just his own fuck-ups and not her problem, they’d always managed to dig into her.
And these were no different.
Even as she tried to think about what the alphas had told her, about how different it was to submit to them, of her own free will, she feared her father was right. Was she just like any omega? Something born and made to be trampled? Was it written in her very DNA?
Her heels clicked against the floor, the noise of people floating through it despite her not having seen many. Galen escorted her, and she played her part by following him quietly until she saw an opening. Her hands were cuffed together in front of her, and she hadn’t got a weapon.
Well, the idiot put me in heels. They could be useful.
Through the long hallway, they passed a door that opened into an office. A large window overlooked the main area, and her stomach again lurched. This time it had nothing to do with the pregnancy.
Cages and other areas to chain up woman were all over the room. Already omegas were bound inside, some quiet, some sobbing, some screaming. Men moved through the space as though shopping at a mall, as if they were picking out furniture rather than living, breathing people.
“You see, you should be thanking me,” her father said. “You could have been down there. Others, they’d have thrown you onto the floor to be bought up by the highest bidder, like the rest of the merchandise here. I didn’t do that—won’t do that. You should show some gratitude.”
She swallowed down the bile in her throat and closed her eyes, not wanting to see it anymore, wishing she could shut out the noise.
For a brief moment, she was almost thankful for Anne not being there, that her suffering was over. Without the alphas coming, Alison was on her own, and she wasn’t confident she could do a damn thing to help anyone.
“She’s beautiful,” a new voice said.
Alison turned to find the man who’d spoken, who was dressed nicely, much like her father. He was younger, perhaps in his thirties, and had blond hair pushed back from his face. No matter how nice he looked on the surface, however, the cruelty in his eyes wasn’t something he could hide.
Geoffrey nodded toward the man. “This is Howard Lostern, your new mate.”
Mate.
She shivered at the word, the immediate denial. Even her nose, able to pick up the scent of the alpha, knew he was all wrong.
That was the moment she accepted that Trent had been right. Even if she fought it, Kyle, Daniel and Trent were her mates. Her body knew it, even if she hadn’t wanted to admit it.
Howard crooked a finger, similar to what Trent had done. Where with Trent, she’d followed the demand without hesitation, drawn there by a pull she didn’t understand, she didn’t move a muscle for this man.
His expression hardened.
Galen shoved her forward, then hooked a leash to her bound cuffs and handed the end to him.
Howard yanked the leash until she was just in front of him. “You have a lot of learning to do, but I think you’ll be worth it. I’m not sure I’ve seen such a pretty omega before.” He took her chin between his fingers, grasping it tightly. “And I’ll enjoy training you.”
No panic rose with the touch. Instead, anger swelled inside her. Train me?
She swung her face forward, striking him in the nose. The crunch was like music, even if she knew she’d pay for it.
Sure enough, he swung his hand, striking her across the face. With the heels and her mind still fuzzy from them drugging her before, she couldn’t keep her balance and fell to the floor.
Wetness dribbled from her lips, and a red spot appeared below her. She remembered the bright red lipstick the women had put on her, and she had to laugh at how they were the same color.
“Do you think this is funny?” Howard asked.
“Yeah,” she said, still on the ground. “I do.”
Howard came forward as though to get in another strike, but froze before contact. She turned to find her father, his hand lifted, palm out, as a warning to the other alpha.
Howard growled lowly. “She’s mine. You don’t tell me what to do with her.”
“She isn’t yours yet. The money hasn’t come through, and until it does, you will not harm property you do not yet own.”
Again, she laughed, uncaring that she looked insane. “You know, you almost had me, Dad.”
He leaned down and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, using it to clear the blood off her face. “How so?”
“I thought for a minute, maybe you were right. Maybe I’d been fighting this whole time to avoid something I was never going to escape. Maybe I was meant to be this person.” She met his gaze head on, truly defying him for the first time in her life. She didn’t just snap, didn’t offer pointless hissy fits, but stood toe-to-toe with the man who had ruined so much of her life. “You were wrong, though. I’m not something to be owned by whoever pays the most. I am not property.”
“I saw you kneeling for those other alphas. If you think that didn’t come naturally, you’re fooling yourself.” His words were soft, as if she were naive and he were trying to help her understand, gently.
“That’s what you don’t get, what you’ll never get. You can’t force someone to submit. It isn’t possible. Trying is like declaring you’re king. If you have to say it, it isn’t true.” She threw his words back at him. “Do you know why I knelt for them? Why I willingly gave up my power to them? Because I trusted them. Because they earned it. Because at the end of the day, it was still always my choice.”
He titled his head but said nothing.
“Mom never loved you. How could she? You were just some man demanding he was king, and in the end, she killed herself rather than spend another fucking day with you.”
That got to him. His face darkened in a way she’d never seen before, and the man who rarely showed any emotion had fury written there across his features.
Still, she didn’t relent, didn’t back down. She was done letting him control her.
“You will do as you’re told,” he said, voice steady and dark. “You will behave yourself or you will find your life very unpleasant. You will listen to your mate, you will do as you are expected, you will have his children and care for them.”
Another groundless, crazy laugh left her at that all. All sorts of fuck that ran through her mind at all the ways that would never happen.
“What’s so funny?” Howard asked.
“I’m already pregnant,” she said. “Sorry, buddy, but you’re buying damaged goods. Whatever little power fantasy you have, it’s never going to happen. I’m never going to submit to you, and I’ll spend my entire life trying to end yours. Hope you’re up for the long haul, buddy, because this will never get any easier.”
Geoffrey grabbed her chin, forcing her eyes to his. “You think you’ve won?” he tsk’d softly. “You have no idea what I am capable of. You will behave, because you will be chained until you learn to. Trust me, no omega has ever outlasted me. And you’re pregnant? That is a very simple problem to fix. Perhaps when we take care of that inconvenience, it will also remove this pointless infatuation you have with those alphas. You will never see them again, not only because you’ll be gone, but because I expect they won’t live long enough to cause me any more problems. I dislike loose ends and they have seen my face.”
The world went away as she stared into her father’s dark eyes. His words slithered through her, casting away the sounds of the people downstairs, the guards in the room, Howard. None of it mattered.
He reached forward and set a hand on her stomach. “You will have offspring with who I decide. Perhaps one of them will actually make for a proper omega. Not this one, of course. Lucky for you, we can take care of it easily tonight.”
The touch was what did it, what snapped loose whatever control she had. Something dark inside her spread out, filling her, twisting her. She’d done a lot of things in her life that weren’t good, a lot that might shock a better person, but she’d never enjoyed them.
She’d done them because she’d needed to, because she logically knew they were necessary.
Whatever it was that took over her wasn’t logical. It didn’t care about what needed to happen, or what should, or what was right or wrong.
It only cared that he had threatened her mates. That he had threatened her unborn child.
She moved forward so fast that her father didn’t even have the ability to scream. She had no idea if anyone else reacted, since her focus was entirely limited. She brought her hand down against his face, only three times, but he stopped moving. A yank to her hands made her growl.
The leash.
She wrapped her fingers around it and yanked back, moving Howard off balance. Still, that fury inside her didn’t abate. Everyone in that room had proven a threat to her mates, to her child, and at that moment she had no idea what mercy was.
She came forward, knocking Howard down and twisting behind him. She got her bound cuffs around him and used them against his throat, her knee in his back. Sickening gurgling noises left him, but she didn’t let up.
Something struck the side of her face.
She snarled at Galen, amazed he hadn’t shot her. Then again, she was worth a pretty penny.
They should have shot her.
She yanked again, hard enough for a snap from Howard’s neck, for him to go unnaturally lax.
She tried to extract herself from him, but Galen did most of the work when he grabbed her arm and yanked, hard. She was nothing compared to him when it came to weight. Her cheek hurt where he’d hit her, and it took a moment to realize he’d used some sort of stick.
Coward.
He grabbed her around the throat, hauling her against his chest, trying to restrain her. “What should I do with her?”
“Chain her up,” her father snapped, his precious composure gone. “We’ll take care of the pregnancy tonight and train her before we sell her off again.”
A crash outside the room floated by her, like a detail she didn’t give a fuck about. Her father still stood there, the threat, the thing she needed to get rid of.
Everyone else turned their heads toward the window, but she didn’t care what happened down there.
She swung her elbow down and into Galen’s gut, then twisted and kicked him as hard as she could. He flew backward, tripped by Howard’s body, before he crashed into the window.
The cheap single-pane glass was no match, and he toppled down. Screams from downstairs filtered in, but her brain was full of rage and red and something old and primal. It had no room for that.
Only she and her father were left in the room, and the widening of his eyes, the fear there, was the first time she’d gotten to see the real coward beneath all those layers of practiced civility he wore, the ones he used to hide what he really was.
He wasn’t strong. He wasn’t in control. He was a little boy who knew the only way he could get what he wanted was to try to bend others to his will.
Too bad. Whether he’d meant to or not, he’d raised a daughter who wouldn’t bend, and he wasn’t nearly strong enough to break her.
“Alison, let’s talk about this,” he said, as if he could explain away what had happened, what he’d said.
No words came to her. She couldn’t even recall words right then.
“You can go. Leave and never come back. I won’t look for you—I’ll leave you be.”
She didn’t believe him. This sort of man had an ego that couldn’t let something go, and even if he could, she wanted blood for what he’d have done if he had the chance.
She rushed forward, leaping at his chest to knock him backward and onto the floor. She snarled down at his face, wanting nothing more than to feel his flesh between her teeth, than to rip out his throat to make sure he was never a threat again.
Whatever this was, whatever she was, it was the last thing her father would ever see.
Trent stopped short at the doorway. After a body had crashed through a window from the upper floor, he’d known damn well where his mate was.
The rest of the place—a large open building set back in the middle of nowhere—didn’t matter.
With all the alphas who had come, with Kara and Claire and even Tiffany, there weren’t a lot of places for the slavers and the buyers to go.
It was chaos, but that worked in their favor. Those who tried to escape were met with Kieran’s rifle outside, since a bullet to the kneecap sure did slow down those who thought they could run.
None of that mattered, though, as Trent took the stairs with Daniel and Kyle behind him.
But at the top was a sight he was pretty sure was the herald of death.
Alison was above her father, another body unmoving on the ground. Blood dripped from her face, her teeth bared and a growl a grizzly would be proud of rumbling from her chest.
The woman he knew was gone. There was nothing of her in that body.
Omega rage was the sort of thing one wished to never see in their entire life, and he could happily go another forty years without ever seeing it again.
There were times when he had to admit he wasn’t at the top of the food chain, and nothing could remind an alpha of that faster than what Alison had been reduced to.
“Pet,” he said, flinching at how not appropriate that name might have been right then.
Still, it made her turn her head toward him, even as her eyes didn’t seem to recognize him.
“Get her off me,” her father shouted.
“I’d shut up if I were you,” Daniel said. “Because if she decides to tear out your throat right now, well, you better get right with your god because no one will be able to stop it.”
Geoffrey paled more but thankfully shut up.
“Come on, sugar,” Kyle tried. “We’re here now. We brought some friends of yours, too. It’s all over now.”
She swallowed, slowly, but when Geoffrey shifted, her gaze zeroed back in.
Fuck, it was like trying to talk down a snarling wolf who had already tasted his prey.
“No, pet, it’s fine. Don’t worry about him. He can’t do anything, now.” Why they were trying to save him, Trent wasn’t quite sure. The fucker deserved whatever she did to him.
But she wasn’t herself, and the last thing she needed was to live with the guilt of killing her father.
She wrapped a hand around his throat, squeezing for a long, terrifying moment before she moved off him.
He went to rise, but a sharp look from Daniel made him think better about it.
Alison came up slowly, her steps careful, studying Trent like she almost recognized him.
Her cheek was swelling, and her lip had been split. It seemed that was where the blood had come from. All in all, she wasn’t in terrible condition.
When she stood just before him, she inhaled, slowly. Good. Scents are written deeper than anything else. If anything could reach into that rage, could settle her, could draw her out of it, it would be smell.
Sure enough, her eyes fluttered closed and she crossed the last bit of space, wrapping her arms around him.
Blood soaked into his shirt, but he didn’t give a damn. He pulled her against his chest as Kyle and Daniel came closer, both doing the same, running their fingers through her hair, touching every visible inch as if to ensure she was okay.
He breathed her in deeply, unable to believe she was really safe.